Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

CAN ANYTHING GOOD COME OUT OF POSTMODERNISM?... 253
are adequate to the task of organizing society in a just manner
for the benefit of all is rejected in both texts. Furthermore both
texts show an awareness of the way in which an excessive rationalism
has been responsible for the establishment of totalitarian
power systems. 5
Such convergences of judgement, while interesting in their
own right, prove to be of secondary importance relative to the
divergences which emerge if one analyses the grounds upon
which these judgements are based and the alternatives which
are proposed. Bauman’s conclusion, as we saw above, is to drastically
reduce our expectations of human reason, abandon all illusions
of universality and foundations in ethics and accept that
morality is chaotic, ambivalent and sporadic. Such a stance is
radically incompatible with the Catholic vision. It would represent,
in fact, an instance of what Fides et ratio calls the kind of
thought which encourages a “distrust” of reason and undermines
confidence in the ability of human beings to discover the
truth about themselves and about what is good for them. While
sharing the judgement that modernity is excessively rationalistic,
Fides et ratio proposes that reason has a legitimate and indispensable
role in the moral life. The alternative to the approach
of modernity is not a nihilistic abandonment of all confidence
in reason, but a more moderate role for reason, which is
open to the mystery of transcendence and has the humility to
learn from other sources.
The difference between Bauman and John Paul II as regards
this first tenet, therefore, consists not in the critique of the excessive
rationalism of modernity, on which point there is some
convergence, but rather in the role reason is understood to play
in ethics. We will examine this point more closely in our study
of the second tenet, but it is important to note that this tenet is
based on two fundamentally different ways of reading history.
One way of expressing this would be to say that the two visions
of morality have their roots in the different narratives examined
above. The narrative within which John Paul II propos-
5 If we interpret the relevant sections of Fides et ratio in the context of
the social encyclicals of John Paul II this point is all the more obvious.